Texas City Model Train Festival, November 8-9, 2014

We were once again set-up in the building across the street from the main Texas City Museum. The Museum itself had several other scales layouts set up there. The Houston Area G Gaugers shared the building with us. When visitors walked into this building, this was the first view they saw.

This is a view looking at our set-up from the other angle. I took these photos Sunday morning at 10am, opening time. As is fairly normal for that time on a Sunday show, the initial run of visitors is pretty light. This gave me a good opportunity to take some photos and video. We had a real good turnout for Saturday, and a pretty reasonable one for Sunday. Sunday is usually lighter. However, we provided entertainment for young and old, and we even met some other S-scalers, and possible future ones!

During set-up Friday night, we discovered a major electrical problem with the double-track wye modules. This is why you can see them in the center of our layout. We were trying to make the wye its own DCC district so that any shorts in it wouldn't lead to the whole layout shutting down. However, we discovered too late that we didn't have the correct components to make this happen.

So, instead of the place where the wye would normally be, we took two of the 4-foot modules that are normally part of the third leg of the wye and put them to service in the main line, as shown in this photo. Unfortunately, this turned our Friday set-up into a five and a half hour effort.

Ria built this corner store Pine Canyon Models kit and got it ready just in time for this show.

Jerry recently revitalized his 4-foot creek module with new, fresh "water". The locals immediately took advantage of it. This module gets quite a bit of attention from the audience.

We discovered during tear-down Sunday night where the clamps were for the backdrops, so we didn't use them for this show. It still looked nice. We only had a few minor electrical issues early Saturday, but the layout and the DCC system worked perfectly the rest of the time. Included in this photo are two of Rusty's passenger trains, Don's passenger train, Peter's freight train passing by on the main line, and Ron's 25-car MP F-units train sitting in the siding in the back tracks (requiring the train to be split in half to be able to make it fit).

This was an impromptu group photo that Jon Butcher took of those of us around at the time. Jon is a member of the HO-scale club set up permanently in the museum, and he is our contact person for this annual show. In the photo from left to right are Steve, Peter, Ria, and Ron.